


Nine Lives

by JazzRaft



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bittersweet, Blood and Injury, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-02
Updated: 2019-02-02
Packaged: 2019-10-21 04:59:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17636399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JazzRaft/pseuds/JazzRaft
Summary: Noctis dreams of horrible, blood-thirsty creatures clawing at him in the dark. If he was smart, he might heed his nightmares, and maybe not approach an injured coeurl with bared teeth in the middle of the night.





	Nine Lives

**Author's Note:**

> A long over-due prompt fill, originally posted over [here!](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/182506637512/hello-love-your-work-d-not-sure-if-you-still)

“Damn…”

Noctis sighed once he was standing out in the dry, night air. He clasped his hands behind his neck, cringing against the clammy dampness of sweat matting his hair. The fresh, piney breath of the woodlands against his skin was a cool fan from the stagnant clotting of the motel room air. And the midnight shade of the parking lot was a much safer darkness than the nightmares he’d left in his room.

He’d gotten good at sneaking out – although he didn’t need to put too much effort into being stealthy, not with Gladio’s snores deafening any creaks in the floor or clicks of the door. They’d have his hide if they woke up and found him missing in the middle of the night, though he didn’t plan on being very long. He just needed to get away from the sweat-stains on the pillowcase, and the sharp teeth sneering behind his closed eyes.

He’d learned to stop screaming awake from his nightmares a long time ago – back when his cries had summoned strangers with stethoscopes to his bedroom instead of the familiar face he’d wanted to see.

It took him a long time to understand why his father was absent on those nights. It took growing up – too quickly for a kid – to finally see how _tired_ his father was on the nights when he was there. It wasn’t the kind of tired that bedtime could cure though; not the yawning, bleary-eyed kind of tired where he was just woken from a nap – the kind of tired Noctis understood when he was little.

No, it was only when Noctis was older, and aching from more pains than in his leg from everything that had happened, that he understood the kind of tired he saw in his father’s eyes.

He stopped screaming after that. He owed it to his father to at least try and be brave; and if he was going to fail at that, to at least do it quietly. His father had deserved rest, for what little it could do to lighten that world-weary look in his eyes. He deserved to rest as much as Noct’s friends did, now.

“Damn, damn, damn…”

Noctis swore quietly to himself, balancing his elbows against the porch railing while he nursed the kinks from his neck. He had hoped that the nightmares might stay behind him in Insomnia, but with no city left to keep them, the dreams chased him out into Lucis. Of course they did. If he couldn’t lose them in the endless labyrinth of bricks and steel, how did he think he could hide from them in the wide open plateaus of Duscae?

He stamped the toe of his boot against the floorboards, staring across the outpost. They’d stopped in the Taelpar Rest Area a few times now, the Three Z’s Motel a personal favorite of his for the name alone. The Crow’s Nest was open through the night, the broad diner windows bright with fluorescent light. He should go inside, order some of Kenny’s fries, put some gil in the pinball machines and chase the daemons in his head away with the bright, beaming bulbs of beating his high score.

But he knew that the tipster behind the counter would feel like chatting, curiously peeling away at Noct’s privacy until the Prince got the good sense to remark on the time and flee back to his room. Besides that, he wasn’t hungry – the smell of cold grease was already unsettling his stomach – and, for once, he wasn’t in the mood to play games.

He didn’t want to be alone, but he didn’t want anyone to see him like this, either. It wasn’t so much to protect his pride, as it was to avoid answering questions that he only had more of himself. Questions that no one, not even the brightest neurologists and psychologists, had ever seemed to have the answer to.

Why couldn’t they just leave him alone, the daemons in his head? Were they _ever_ going to stop? Was he always going to keep losing the people that had kept them away? Was there ever going to be a day when the world stopped being so full of madness, that he might finally be able to sleep?

“Damnit!”

He kicked off from the motel porch, hoping that if he put more distance between himself and his pillow it might quiet all those questions. Once his feet hit the blacktop, a tiny, distant alarm rang in the back of his head, reminding him that he wasn’t in the Citadel anymore. That a walk to clear his head didn’t come with the privilege of safety anymore. The night was dark and full of terrors without the Wall of Insomnia to keep those terrors out. There was a reason they blew so much gil on motel rooms past nightfall.

But Noctis didn’t care. Ignis and Prompto might be afraid of the dark, but he’d wandered through enough of it in his life to know his way back out.

He headed across the street, forcing a wan smile at the insomniac woman lounging against the fire-engine red bed of the JM Market truck. He hurried forward, eyes on the darkness, to avoid any warnings against leaving the safety of the floodlights. Like all the well-meaning countrymen of Lucis, she would tell him it wasn’t safe to travel at night. And like all the other times Ignis advised him to head to shelter after nightfall, Noctis would keep going.

Tonight, especially, he almost welcomed a daemon attack in the woods. At least he’d be able to put his sword through that one.

His pocket light switched on automatically once it registered the lack of light, casting a sharp, white-blue glow across the forest floor. _I won’t go far,_ he promised the mental images of Gladio and Iggy, arms crossed and scowling like two unamused schoolteachers. _Just to the end of the path. Just… need some air._ Noctis folded his arms around himself as he walked, rubbing the goosebumps from his skin.

Tonight’s nightmare had been about his father. He’d been having a lot of those since he’d gotten the call. He’d dreamed of the hundred, horrible ways he could have possibly died, and the hundred, even more horrible ways he could have possibly lived. Those dreams, the ones where he survived, only for Noctis to wake up and remember he hadn’t, hurt most of all.

Tonight’s had been different from all the rest. He’d opened his eyes to his father on the throne room floor, cold and dead. And like all the other dreams that tortured him with hope, he got up, warm and alive.

He smiled at him. But something was off about it… The teeth. They were long and sharp, Noct realized. And the hands were crooked like claws. His ears were pulled back into points, like the goblins in the Balouve Mines. And he was covered in _fur_. Like the sci-fi shapeshifters from the monster movies Noctis watched late at night, changing from man to beast and howling at the moon. His eyes turned yellow, a burning gold like that of twin setting suns.

He grinned at Noctis, and had promised, “ _I’ll always protect you.”_

Noctis awoke unsettled, not sure what to make of it, only knowing he wanted the image of his father turned into some sort of movie monster-man out of his head. But he could still hear that growling, guttural _wrongness_ carrying the words, see the viciousness of the yellow eyes in the darkness, gleaming with nocturnal malice against the edges of his flashlight…

Noctis stopped in his tracks. He wasn’t dreaming anymore. Those eyes in the dark were real.

In the disc of light his flashlight made, the big, yellow paws of a coeurl prowled into view. The long, serpentine whiskers crackled dimly with electric light. Noctis stood very still, having learned by experience how much he _did not_ want to be on the receiving end of those whiplash whiskers. One electrocution to near death was once too many.

His thoughts galloped through all the strategies he’d learned to survive an encounter with a coeurl. Daggers would be the weapon of choice, quick for getting clear of even quicker strikes. He didn’t have a magic flask on him – he didn’t have _anything_ on him, damnit, one zap from those whiskers and he was done for. Taken out like the stupid tourist he was, taking a midnight stroll like he thought he was invincible.

_Better to run_ , he thought. Better to just back away slowly, keep his head down, and not provoke it. He was prepared to do just that, keeping his daggers right at the veil between his armiger and his hand, just in case.

He paused though, curious, when the coeurl didn’t move. It didn’t circle him with the same, predatory hunger as the packs he’d stumbled across before had. It snarled and hissed with the same lethal threat, but it didn’t move closer. It didn’t blink as it glared at Noctis, lean muscles quivering.

That’s when Noctis saw the blood. A long gash bled from its back. Perhaps a scrape with another hunter, or maybe a territory dispute with another animal. It wasn’t looking for food, Noctis realized. It hadn’t seen him in the dark and approached him to kill. _He’d_ stumbled upon _it_ trying to find shelter to, literally, lick its wounds.

It was scared. It saw him, an upright shadow, knowing that image as a threat, and wanted him gone. It mirrored himself, standing braced to either attack or flee the second he moved. Fleeing seemed like the better option to Noctis. Even injured, a coeurl could take him out quicker than he could slay it. Besides, it was probably going to die without his intervention, anyway…

Maybe he was a little too vulnerable from the impact of his dreams. Maybe he was a little too soft – he’d always liked animals, even the dangerous ones. While he knew this was not a house-pet, not a fluffy friend like the stray cat on the boardwalk to Galdin, he empathized with it, nonetheless. He’d hunted a number of coeurl to pay for motel fare and diner food and curatives to survive the trip across Lucis. And with the amount of electrocutions and pounces he’d suffered beneath their deadly paws, he shouldn’t sympathize.

But that thought, of it “dying anyway,” about not caring if it did or not… He thought about his father. Stabbed in the back and left to bleed out. Like an animal. Hunted for no reason more than his name.

Very, very slowly, Noctis started to back away, light dragging across the grass and leaving the coeurl in pitch darkness. He could still see its eyes, unmoving and yellow, as he backed his way to the road.

_This is stupid_ , his own self-preservation told him, as he timidly stepped up to the JM Market salesgirl. _This is going to get you killed_ , her curious stare said to him, as she placed a potion in his hand for gil.

“Hey…”

The coeurl hadn’t left yet. Strange, he thought. It should have run the second he was gone. Maybe it was hurt too badly. Maybe it meant to lay down and die right there in the bushes on the side of the road. Like roadkill. Maybe it couldn’t go on anymore.

Noctis knew it was stupid to feel sad about that. That was the circle of life, right? It was survival of the fittest, natural selection, all that morbid, merciless crap he tuned out of in biology class. Yes, he was soft. He shouldn’t treat animals the same way he would treat people. And yet, he knew he couldn’t fall back asleep that night, knowing he could have helped a life in need, and didn’t. Especially not after his dreams… And even if that life wasn’t human. Wasn’t his father’s.

The coeurl growled at him, shoulders coiled to pounce, a pale, mountainous shadow against the darkness. _You’re going to lose a hand if you get any closer,_ it seemed to say. Or maybe that was just his survival instinct talking – though he was pretty sure that was asleep, otherwise, he wouldn’t be trying this in the first place.

“You’ll thank me,” Noctis said, mostly to lie to himself. “Or eat me,” he said, a little more honestly.

He crept as close as he could get for the effect of the potion to reach the wound, the coeurl’s snarls growing louder the closer he got. He didn’t have to touch it, he didn’t have to get _too_ close for it to work, but he definitely had to be too close for his own comfort. He could smell the sting of the blood, the heady animal musk, and his own fear perfuming the air, as he bared his arm to potential teeth and cracked the magic bottle into dust.

The green sparks misted over the wound, cooling angry flesh and clearing off infection. Fur and flesh melded back together, stemming the blood flow and numbing the pain. Noctis almost expected it not to work – he had no idea if an effect intended for humans would work the same way for an animal. But medicine seemed to be universal. He hoped the same went for gratitude.

The coeurl growled, deep and menacing, and Noctis turned his head to meet scalding, golden eyes. He held his breath, held his daggers close at the edges of his armiger, regretting his stupid sympathies as he braced for the animal to attack.

It opened its mouth to roar at him, massive fangs yawning in his face, breath rancid, like meat, like the meat of men it had eaten before him… and then, it pivoted on its paws and ran, galloping into the bushes and vanishing into the night.

All of Noct’s breath left him like a popped balloon and he dropped back onto his hands, sitting stunned in the grass.

_Gods_ , he really hoped that didn’t come back to bite him in the ass. Literally.

* * *

“Someone help Noct!”

“I’m pinned down! Iggy! Help Noct!”

“Noct, hold on!”

That was all he could really do at this point – hold onto the MT cable sapping the strength from his chest. He couldn’t pull it off, the bolts of magitek power stunning his muscles into an almost rigor mortis shock. His magic blasted behind his eyes with every pulse, tearing out of him in great gulps along the vampire thread to the machine at the other end.

His friends were caught up in their own grapples for survival, desperately trying to escape their deadlocks to help him. But by the time they got to him, he would be drained to the point of fainting. He had to get out of this himself. He had to hack away at the thing, claw, kick, or do whatever it took to get this damn thing off of him… But it was stealing all of his strength faster than he could will his limbs to move. The edges of his vision were getting fuzzy, blotting out the battlefield with black. His knees gave out from under him, old pains exacerbated by the thieving pulse.

He wasn’t going to make it out of this. He was going to pass out. The Empire was going to get him…

The cable snapped off of him in a sudden, piercing screech of an MT dying under the noonday sun. His magic rushed back into him like a charging dualhorn, knocking the breath right out of his chest and blasting color back into his vision. He looked frantically around the field, at the spinning blades of MTs clashing with his friends, at the dirt and grass and dust coughing up into the air beneath Gladio’s catastrophic crashes of his greatsword.

Between all of the chaos, Noct’s deliriousness started to kick in. Because he _swore_ he saw the great, golden body of a coeurl bounding through the fray. He thought he saw four, giant paws pouncing against the chests of MTs, huge fangs digging into metal throats, the snap of bolted whiskers shorting out the circuits.

“What the hell is that doing here?” he heard Prompto squeal over the clash of swords.

Once Ignis reached him, and cracked open a potion over his head, and the cool wash of the magic cleared his vision, Noctis got to his feet, and saw it. He wasn’t hallucinating after all.

A coeurl, golden and spattered with scourge, prowled the edges of the battlefield as the last MT melted into writhing shadows. Its face wrinkled in a snarl as it watched the four, would-be hunters left standing. Its long tailed lashed the tips of the grasses, low growls goading them into striking if they dared.

Noct’s heartbeat rose when, through the settling dust, he recognized a long scar between the undulating shoulders of the carnivore. Noctis blinked the dizziness from his head, wondering if he was dreaming again.

Then, he met its cruel, yellow eyes. It stopped pacing, snarled, roared at him, and then bolted, racing into the trees of the Duscaen wilderness. As it ran, Noctis noticed its lopsided gate, not quite a limp, but not as even as the graceful bounds of creatures he’d seen just like it.

He tried not to smile at it. It was almost like the creature had a bad knee. Because it ran just like he did.

All was quiet. For a long moment. Until Gladio planted his greatsword in the ground, whistled long and low and bewildered, and said, “Well. That was something.”

It was not an isolated something. For days, all across the Duscaen landscape, throughout numerous close calls against various enemies, the coeurl would reappear. Like a fearsome, golden ghost, it would materialize from the trees, the brush, the tall grass of the plains, and join the fray. Always when Noctis knew he was about to lose. And every time it was finished, it would prowl the edges of the field, snap its teeth at them, and run away, always leaving his friends confounded.

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Ignis mused one night at camp, after yet another encounter with the benevolent man-eater. “By every account, it makes no sense. Wildlife generally avoids magitek. The sounds from the fighting should have scared it off. I’ve never once heard of a coeurl attacking a magitek soldier.”

“Are things getting that bad?” Prompto asked, scrutinizing a blurry photo he’d managed to capture of the animal. “I mean, between the war and the longer nights, maybe they’re getting more aggressive? Nature tends to do that right? Evolve with the bad times?”

“If that’s the case, why leave us alive?” Gladio asked. “It’s not like it’s getting a meal out of MTs. Why go after them if it wasn’t fighting for prey? Meaning us.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Ignis sighed, perplexed beyond reason.

Noctis stayed quiet while they hypothesized, pretending to be too absorbed in King’s Knight to contribute to the conversation, offering only vague, half-inputs whenever it sounded like they were directing their curiosities his way. He really couldn’t offer any insight. No matter his illicit, medical encounter with the coeurl, there was no evidence in any anthropological text to suggest the creature was capable of empathy or honor or gratitude. It couldn’t have to do with the potion he gave it. It wouldn’t go out of its way to save him in return for saving it.

It’d have to be human to do that. It was just… too fantastical to believe otherwise. He was anthropomorphizing a deadly predator, like a kid in a cartoon. It was just fantasy. There must have just been something wrong with it. Some unnatural instinct, likely a product of the changing environment, like Prompto said. Some mutation in its genetic habits.

One night, Noctis woke up from another nightmare. It was a little harder to sneak out of a tent than a motel room, but his friends were so bone-tired from all the walking they did throughout the day that no one roused when he rustled from the canvas flaps and into the night.

Duscae was noisy with the gentle whispering of night life between the trees and reeds of the lake. Crickets and frogs buzzed all around him, unseen in the darkness. He walked to the edge of the haven, staring out at the Alstor Slough, where the mammoth silhouettes of the catoblepas slept. They feared no daemons in the night time. The frogs, the bats, the owls; none of them were afraid of the dark like Duscae’s people were.

He found that more comforting than laying in the thick shadows of the tent, where it felt like every patch of dark was a daemon breathing down his neck.

When the shadows moved at the foot of the haven, Noctis didn’t jump back in fright. It was an insane person who left the safety of the Oracle’s runes to investigate something shifting in the darkness. He’d seen this horror movie before. But like that night across the street from the Taelpar Rest Area, he’d rather face the night than the shadows in his own bedroll.

And somehow, he wasn’t surprised to find his strange, coeurl companion prowling about the stones.

“Can’t sleep either, huh?”

He didn’t know why he talked to animals, as if they could talk back to him. Maybe it was just a way of comforting his own unease. A way for him to talk through how little it made sense that one of Duscae’s apex predators _didn’t_ want to eat him.

The animal hissed and snarled like always, unfriendly and perpetually angry, but not threatening him. Nevertheless, Noct’s blood raced in his veins, trained to fear the sharp teeth and claws of a predator in the night. It was a fight to get himself to sit down, between where the haven rock met the grass of the plains. The coeurl stared at him, unblinking. Noctis flipped through everything he’d ever read about pack dynamics, foolishly banking on his own theory that, somehow, this creature had claimed him and his friends as its own colony.

He stretched out his legs in front of him and leaned against the stone, leaving himself open and submissive. It was supposed to be a show of trust, he’d read – though, this was more for house cats than coeurls. It was supposed to show he wasn’t a threat. And by baring his throat to the creature, he was either surrendering to it snapping his neck and claiming dominance, or if Noctis was lucky – and his theory wasn’t as crazy as it sounded in his head – instead of earning an execution, he might instead earn its respect.

He held his breath as he watched it in the dark, creeping closer to investigate. With every silent, oddly lopsided step it took, Noctis thought to himself, _This is how I die. Not in a blaze of glory getting vengeance on the Empire. Not by some tragic assassination as King of Lucis that goes in the history books. Nope, I die as a stupid fool thinking he’s an animal behaviorist._

The gods must have been looking out for his dumb ass though. Because rather than tear open his throat, the coeurl sniffed his face, decided he was inedible, and sat down next to him. Noct’s heart pounded in relief, and he forced his breaths to stay even. The great cat sat like a sphinx, front paws splayed evenly beneath its chest, head high as it surveyed the night. Its long whiskers curled back to its hindquarters, running parallel to the scar Noctis had saved it from.

“Glad you’re feeling better,” Noctis teased.

The coeurl didn’t look at him. It merely stared ahead, a silent sentinel over the haven. And Noctis knew that reaching out to touch it was a gamble, but he didn’t know how else to convey his thanks for all the times this strange creature had shown up to save him. He was careful and slow with it, translating his movements in the cat’s periphery. He watched its taut muscles, its closed teeth, kept an eye out for warning signs. But it remained still and watchful and didn’t flinch away as Noctis pressed his palm against its flank.

The fur was smooth and thicker than he might have expected. Not as soft as all the kittens he’d petted in his lifetime, but it was warm, the lethal muscles underneath firm as old bark. Noctis quietly, carefully stroked along the spotted pelt. He felt its ribs expand and contract on rhythmic breaths. He’d heard the term “content as a kitten,” but never “content as a coeurl.” Not with how many missing hikers and wounded hunters were reported for crossing them.

“Thanks for the saves,” Noctis murmured.

And even though he knew it was unwise, he felt his eyes growing heavy with long lost sleep as he sat next to the warm, silken-furred creature. He must have fallen asleep. Because he must have been dreaming when he felt a warm tongue swipe against his forehead.

As he closed his eyes, he saw his father again. He felt dread spike through him, waiting for his shadow against the sunset to turn and warp into that frightening man-beast once more.

They were standing at the edge of the lake in Duscae, pine trees framing the orange waters, his father set against the sun. He turned to Noctis, arm outstretched, and without thinking twice, Noctis ran to him. He flung his arms around his waist and buried his face in the jacket of his suit, trying not to sniffle and cry as he felt his warm hand brush across his forehead.

“ _I’ll always protect you, Noct. Just not in the ways you can see.”_

Dreams didn’t make sense. About as much sense as a wild animal coming to his rescue in the middle of nowhere. But rather than be confused and disheartened by the words, and the yellow eyes that smiled with it, Noctis felt… safe.

There were tears on his face when he woke up the next morning. But he wasn’t sad. He wasn’t scared. That was the first time he’d dreamed without a nightmare chasing him from sleep in a long, _long_ time.

The coeurl was gone. But he expected that wouldn’t be the last he saw of it.

He was going to need a lot more protecting, after all.


End file.
